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10 Homes...recycled!

Q-Domus.com's experts

Editorial Team

In UK we are quite accustomed to plasterboard, bricks and roof tiles built homes. But there are many alternatives materials that can be used, more ecological, cheaper and often more creative too, which allow to own a sustainable home. And they go beyond green building! In fact, we talk about homes built with recycled materials. Here are some examples.

Photographer Nick Olson and fashion designer Lilah Horwitz are two creative talents that take their dreams seriously, as it seems. They left their daily job to make and live in a home largely made of recycled windows, and the rest timber-wood. Their glass dwelling stands on wonderful West Virginia mountains, the place where, since their first date, they imagined to build a home from which looking to wonderful sunsets.

When Bodan Litnianski moved from Ukraine to France in 1930, he lived in a home in ruins, and he started to arrange it using only unconventional materials such as shells, glass, toys and everything he could find. Once accomplished the dwelling, Bodan kept on working creating also a wonderful garden in the adjacent plot of land.

The Junk Castle, that is “the odds and ends castle”, in the state of Washington, was entirely built with recyclable materials and it costed its owner, high school teacher and artist Victor Moore, only $500. What a dream!

And here is one of the three recycled bottles homes built by Édouard T. Arsenault in Prince Edward Island, in Canada, with 25.000 bottles. It's really a favour to nature!

John Milkovish, son of the Great Depression, harassed by the idea of refusing throwing anything away, for years stored also empty beer can that drank each afternoon with his wife. In the early 1970 years he dragged down to his home all the cans he had gathered in his garret for years, accurately cut, opened and flattened and he started to upholster home walls with them. But he had no idea of the fascinating thing he was creating. The non-profit association Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, determined to preserve this piece of folk art, bought the property almost 10 years ago, starting an accurate restoration of the house and opening it to the public.

The Scrap House was built for the World Environment Day 2005 by a group of architects, artists, entrepreneurs, functionaries and engineers from San Francisco, using only scraps and recyclable materials.

Built using thousands of plastic bottles, the Casa de Botellas is an instrument of ecological and social responsibility promotion. The idea occurred to the family Alfredo Santa Cruz in Puerto Iguazu, in Argentina and it includes also a recreation room in the home courtyard, rigorously PET.

This wonderful home was built at Woodland, in Utah, using two old silos no more used. The interior is surprisingly modern and technological.

When Argentinian industrial designer Manuel Rapoport had two twins he found himself covered by an infinity of milk powder cans. Thinking that it was a too much noble material to throw it away, he decided to use it to tile the home he was building for his family in Patagonia. He used also cans which contained tomato sauce and whisky and cognac bottles to create bricks for windows and skylights.

Finally, Dan Phillips builds beautiful homes at a low-cost price using quite completely recyclable materials, from wooden frames disused. In the end, as Dan affirms, it isn't possible to breaking the law, but apart from that, there are infinite possibilities! Who can blame him?